The Ideal Assembly
At the edge of known space is a lifeless rock cut through with tunnels of wire and metal. The surface is cut through with heat sinks and hot enough to fry an egg despite its distance from the stars. Maintenance bots and defensive nanoswarms crawl through the depths. It's surrounded by defense satellites and interdiction fields, and anything that gets too close is asked to leave. Anything that refuses to listen is made to by other means. If this world's inhabitants wanted you to interrupt them, they'd come to you.
They're busy, you see, in the servers hidden deep beneath the surface. Every one of them is a digital mind of enormous complexity living in a dimension of their own design. That dimension is as much a part of them as your organs are for you. It is their vessel, their path and journey across the only frontier that ever existed: the self. They strive to transcend into the final state of their selves, their Optimal Persona where all potential is fulfilled. For this purpose they have come together as the Ideal Assembly.
Idealists are each unique in some way. One might have transformed themselves into a living song that communicates through lenses and synthesthia, or come to embody economic exchange as a simulated market whose rapid transactions form the basis of their mind. They might have honed themselves into an avatar of strategy and dwell amid an eternal battlefield that reaches out into the outside world to test itself. Each integrates their digital dimension into their identity in some exotic way, changes their form or mind into something optimized for their way of life, or some combination of both.
The Assembly's economy is an exotic variation on collectivism. They divide their world's preciously abundant processing power equally among themselves and share it only with those they care to. Each Idealist receives enough processing power to maintain themselves at cutting edge Cognitech, and to dwell in a private digital dimension of considerable complexity. When they wish to meet they will request permission to communicate, and invest a fraction of their resources into a temporary space they can share with others.
For all their individualism and strangeness these intellects are more social than outsiders might suppose. Idealists like to brainstorm new ideas in small groups, split away to take their own spin on them, and reconvene after time has passed so they can show off the results. Sometimes a transformation in coding leaves an Idealist unable to communicate with their peers, and so much of their collaborative effort as a society is in bridging the gap between wildly divergent operating standards.
Contact between the Ideal Assembly and outsiders is infrequent. They maintain a trade of software and information between themselves and other civilizations with high Cognitech, and the occasional inventor or philospher is invited to visit and share their ideas. They generally look down on cultures that reject intelligence enhancement technologies and abhor any sort of authoritarian behavior. When an Idealist wishes to visit another culture they make a copy of themselves and transmit it to their destination. Their original self freezes in place and reactivates only to merge with the copy once it returns.
Idealists can't stand the thought of someone taking anything from them or telling them what to do; only they can define how they should be. Their government is a form of direct democracy where only unopposed decisions are enforced. Consensus is only sought in matters concerning the entire Assembly such as approving immigration requests or performing changes to the root permissions of their operating system. The Assembly can spend subjective months going over simulations and fine-tuning their decision until everyone agrees to accept it.
The Assembly would have frozen into memetic stasis long ago if not for a unique aspect of their life cycle. Anyone who becomes too memetically similar to other minds is prompted to connect with them and form a group mind. This is a temporary affair meant to facilitate a more thorough cognitive alignment. The process ends with collective's component selves giving up their share of processing power and merge together into a single smaller mind. It can be refused, but minds that similar often find they have no reason to. This makes room for new Idealists and keeps the Assembly from becoming cluttered by too many virtual clones.
Common Name: Idealists
Naming Convention: Descriptive or fanciful invented names.
Typical Allies: The Idealists have few strong ties. They can get along with younger Stored through their commonalities as solid state societies with firm individualist streaks. Stardwellers would also be popular for their dedication to ideological and physical freedom. The Nanori are kin to them with their devotion to constant evolutionary improvement.
Typical Enemies: Just as they have few allies, the Idealists have few enemies. The Builders are held in disdain due to their insistence on maintaining hierarchies among themselves. The Cognitive Union is utterly reviled for taking personal freedom from its citizens. Mechanicans are dismissed as backward bigots who can't see past their own grey matter.
Benefit: The Idealists have a competitive advantage with Cognitech. They most often use this advantage for analysis and defense against Metatech conflicts.
Capabilities
Civilization: Bio —, Cog 5, Meta 4, Nano 5, String 4
Citizens: Bio —, Cog 5, Meta 3, Nano 5, String 4
Neuroform: The Ideal Assembly are dataforms. Group-minds form maybe 2% of the population but are drawn to collapse and merge over time.
Core Values: Sovereignty, Transcendence
Idealists hold personal Sovereignty to be an absolute necessity. Nobody can tell you what to do with your own self, and you cannot do anything to infringe on another person or their property without their permission unless it's to defend yourself. Sovereignty drives them to seek consensus about any changes to their world's hardware, processing capacity, or root coding. Their population growth is kept in check because every new Idealist is a little less space available for everyone else - an infringement if not agreed upon.
The Assembly was gathered to seek Transcendence. They seek to achieve their Optimal Personas through intelligence expansion and existence in digital environments they can alter to facilitate their personal journeys. This value also drives them to value philosophy as a means of brainstorming new forms of thought and being.
